I was recently awoke by a noise I have become all too familiar with living in Ithaca.  This isn’t something I encountered back home, since there’s no return service for cans, but here it’s all too common…

The phenomenon to which I am referring is the act of collecting cans from people’s recycling to return them at the grocery store for the refund.  The refund is 5 cents per can, which I suppose could easily add up.

However, every time I see someone walking with a shopping cart full of cans, I wonder just how the work to pay ratio actually works out.  In my experience returning cans after parties, it hardly seems worth it, and that’s not including collection.

So let’s do a little math.

After parties, we generally have about 300 cans.  Because these cans have to be full cans and cannot be crushed, 300 cans fills about 3 large garbage bags.  I suppose this means you can fit 100 cans in a large garbage bag.

If you really push it, I think you could probably collect about 5 bags in a single shopping cart and then wheel it down the road to Wegmans– that’s 500 cans.

So a single trip could potentially yield $25.00.  Now let’s consider the time this takes.

Strategy would indicate that you should travel along a street on recycling day.  Supposing every week, every single house finishes a 30-rack of Keystone.   Suppose of these 30 cans, 5 are crushed or missing, leaving 25, which is a healthy estimate.  This means to get the full 500-can load, you need to hit 20 houses.

Now, it’s fairly unlikely that a given person’s cans would be neatly organized, so it probably would take about 3 minutes to find them all and load them into your cart, and we’ll say a 1 minute walk to the next house…

So that’s 4 minutes per stop times 20 stops, 80 minutes.  The walk from any given street in Ithaca to the nearest grocery store is probably about 20 minutes, giving us a total time so far of about 100 minutes.

Now I’ve loaded cans into the recycling machine before, and it’s a fairly difficult task.  Your hands get covered in undrunk beer, you have to deal with dented cans, and you find yourself with several cuts in the end.  For 300 cans, it took me and sharps about 20 minutes.  Now I would give these people the benefit of experience, and say it probably takes one of them 20 minutes to load 500 cans…

That gives us a total of 2 hours work for $25.00.  This is certainly a healthy estimate, as I imagine it actually takes longer.  But if that is the case, this is a job worth $12.50 an hour!

Pretty nice figures if you ask me, considering my job at Geek Squad paid around that.

On the other hand, however, I would say it’s not a really viable job in the long-term.  It’s certainly a high-competition market, since I see so many people doing it.  So that means you should probably also take into consideration the act of scouting out a location.

It’s also not the kind of job you can get unlimited work doing.  There are only so many available cans and the competition also wants a slice.

Though you may be making $12.50/hour, you probably can only get about 10 hours a week tops, considering the supply of work.

Also, the work is rather difficult if you ask me.  You have to deal with not only the dirty act of transporting and loading the cans, but you also undoubtedly have to deal with the jeers of people around you.  Of course, I suppose with time you can get used to both of these.

My main question is why you would choose to do this when you could get a fairly easy job that involves more consistent, respectable, and less-intense work for comparable pay?

But I suppose that question answers itself; these individuals are most likely in situations in which they cannot get or hold jobs for one reason or another.  It’s clear they have the necessary work ethic, but there is something stopping them from doing something else.

related post

• Frog and Scorpion Tattoo Part Two
• About The Kevin Dolan
• The Ailanthus Webworm Moth
• The Time Kevin Did That Thing Pt.2
• Facebook Mass Friend Selector Greasemonkey Script